A week in Sungei Telang

June 27, 2005

It has taken me a long time to get around to writing this blog entry. I have been in Sungei Telang for five days now, and now I finally feel like I have time to sit down and write. It is also a cool day, after a huge rain storm this morning, meaning that it is cool enough to sit, think, and write.

The area I am in is beautiful. It is in the foot hills of the mountains that form the backbone of Sumatra. A few miles down the road towards Muara Bungo and there are simply rolling hills. A mile up the road into the transmigration camp, where people from Java have been moved by the government, you can see real huge mountains. From Sungei Telang, I am surrounded by large hills, baby mountains. A few miles up the river is Kerinci Sebelat National Park, one of the largest national parks in Indonesia (I think). In 1993 this national park was the third most biodiverse area in the world. It is not any more, but it is still unusually diverse. People from the village have seen the highly endangered Sumatran tigers. We are the closest village to the national park, meaning that the river water is clean and crystal clear. The river, which is used for bathing, fishing, washing clothes, and, for some, as a toilet, is about 20 feet wide with a stone bottom. The bathing place near the village head’s house (where I am staying) is about 4 feet deep in the dry season. A few hundred feet down or up the river there are small rapids. Kids from the village wader through the river wearing homemade goggles and carrying home made spear guns, operated with the plastic from inner tubes. They only use the spear guns for big fish—generally one kid lifts up a rock and the other kid just grabs the fish that are hiding under it. I have never seen a kid with less than 4 or five fish in his or her basket.

The village itself is tiny. There are five hamlets to the village, but they are all so far apart that the shared name is simply a formality. The hamlet I am in, which is the original hamlet, and therefore is named Sungei Telang, is one lane, maybe 500 feet long. The older half of the houses are on stilts, built to protect the owners from floods and wild animals from the near by jungle. The newer houses are on the ground—there are fewer wild animals to worry about, and it only floods about once a year. The village is much more traditional than Lubuk Kambing. Forget getting married at 17-- girls here get married at 14, and have children by age 15. Their husbands are generally 18-20. You are not allowed to whistle—I’m not sure why. If people dress inappropriately, or if women and men bathe together at the same spot in the river, a tiger is supposed to attack. People have sawahs (wet rice) and ladangs (dry rice) or rubber farms. At the transmigration camp up the road, people grow chili, cassava, water spinach, peanuts, and other food crops. Not much is bought from the cities, generally because there just isn’t much cash coming in or out of Sungei Telang.

I am living in the village head’s house. It is an old house, raised off the ground on wooden stilts. The village head is terse old man. He spends his day listening to shortwave radio, sometimes in English. Unlike in Lubuk Kambing, I know that there have been no great upsets in the world because I hear the BBC of VOA yammering about stagnation in Iraq and boycotts in South Africa. His wife is a jolly old lady, actually probably in her early 40s, who has lost her two front teeth. They have two girls, a four year old named Fadili and a 7 year old named Fadilah. They are adorable and spunky. They come swimming with me when I go to bathe and the little one insists on being carried around the house. For the last few days, the village-head’s niece (whose name I forget), has moved into the house. She is 17 and has a three month old baby named Pika who is absolutely adorable. She and her husband are divorced, and her mom has come to this house to help her daughter take care of Pika. She never leaves the house, having to keep an eye on Pika constantly. At 17 I was dying my hair blue and going bowling. I asked her if she ever gets bored and she looked at me in shock, “oh course not! she's my daughter. It just makes me love her more”. Brave woman.

Down river from Sungei Telang are a series of very well studied villages. It seems that every other village up and down the road has an environmental NGO village facilitator. They are from WARSI, a major Indonesian environmental NGO; ICRAF, the World Agroforestry Center; ACM, CIFOR’s Adaptive Collaborative Management program; RUPES, which has something to do with ICRAF; and CAPRi, CIFOR’s (and my) very own Collective Action and Property Rights program. It is surprisingly nice to have this many other organizations around. Everyone knows each other, it seems, and it forms a nice community of big city people who generally spend their time in small villages. It gives people a valuable resource—each other—to answer problems they are facing. It means that when people want to see their friends, they need only jump on a motorbike and go. It also means that people can get together. Two days ago ICRAF organized a hike through an old rubber plantation to show some of the people from the local village about how biologically diverse they are. They invited the other environmental NGOs, and all together over 40 people trampled through the forest for 2 hours to reach a beautiful water fall. These NGO-kids, mostly in their 20s or 30s, seem to be a really sharp group of interesting people—I had a great deal of fun tramping through the woods for a day with them. It also means that now, when I go back to Bungo, I have a group of people I know, and with whom I can share the excitement of eating something other than chilied ferns.

As for work, I am here to work with Yenti Rizal, the village facilitator for Sungei Telang. He seems really nice and eager, older than Neldy, and perhaps not as “cool”. We have spent the last few days working on PAR process and writing skills. I am feeling so much more confidant about my ability to teach PAR—I really feel like I have it in hand now. This is much more than I could say before I started this job. Considering it seems to be the method of choice for community-based conservation work, it is a very good thing to feel comfortable with. And with writing, Yenti and I spent today with large sheets of people doing mind-mapping for an outline that he has to submit for his final product—a long paper outlining everything he has learned. It took 3 hours and 5 square feet of paper to go over the first half of the outline. Yenti has done a lot of background research, but almost no village facilitation— almost the exact the opposite of Neldy. He is working with a men’s farmer’s group who want to get legal certification for their land, and a women’s collective work group. Interesting side note: This village has one of the most long lasting, productive women’s collective action groups. It is called a Pelhin group, and involves women trading day labor— if a group of women work collectively in your field for one day, you own each one of those women one day’s labor. The social pressure to repay ensures that people pay up, and the cycle continues. Lots of good lessons about village-level collective action. Frustratingly, Yenti has had to go home to his village to finish a land purchase, so there is a stall in the work for the next two days. I’ll meet up with him again in Bungo for some serious visiting with government agencies and collecting information. I am also work with Yulia, one of the Bogor management team, on a paper on gender and collective action to be presented in Thailand on October.

As for now, I am learning to cook water spinach and how to collect ferns. I am learning that the black monkeys with the golden babies that I see in the trees are horrid pests to farmers with land near the forest. I am doing chores around the house and playing with the kids. I am resting in the afternoon and reading about the history of quantum mechanics. I am trying to keep people from knowing I have a laptop because I just don’t want to tell them how much it cost. I already discount it by 50% when people ask, and that is still more than most people have ever seen. I am working with Yenti in the morning and the afternoon, and going to visit people at night. Things are well.